Date: 2/19/21
Time: 6:29AM
Subject: ⇧⌘T

TextEdit provides the modal binary of RICH vs PLAIN, which is similar to the quality assurance assessment I apply to tea. Echinacea, peppermint, turmeric, calendula, catnip, anise - rich. Chamomile, tulsi, oat straw, jasmine (depending on blend time) - plain. Mikey works in quality assurance but I do not quite know what this entails for him. I suppose it is all I do online, logging in to determine the pros and cons of various things, customizing their internal and external cohesion, ensuring their quality, and then digitizing the results.

The command key design (⌘) is based off of a Bowen knot, or a heraldic knot, or a true lover's knot, or Saint John's Arms design. Because it is not cinched together/knotted, it is not actually a knot - technically it is an unknot.

iCloud just conjured up a Notes file from December 20th, 2016. Contents include only two lines:

the knot in the rosary
art means you were in danger and got all the way through to the end

Now I feel something else about art, but can appreciate the diptych of anxiety.

Heracles and Omphale story
Joni Mitchell - Mingus (The Experimental Sessions)
History of the Command key

Date: 2/17/21
Time: 11:05AM
Subject: Tiny scholar

It is very not new, to applaud how cool the magic of art-making is. We can comment on something without commenting on it? We can build a world about a very specific thing without naming that specific thing or talking about it at all, in fact all we talk about is a mountain and a lion? We can revive our personal agency by choosing to erase or obscure for the sake of a better weathered, more creative, more soul-to-vessel description. Very nice. Very very very.

It would be ideal if I could be paid to take one single academic class, where I could write about things that challenge my writing practice and improve my linguistic skill, without feeling the stresses of capitalistic scholarship and the white supremacist nature of the institutional grading system. For now I chase the feeling through self-assigned prompts and activities that awaken my thinking brain, like editing other people’s work or making six drafts of one poem or echoing the tones and modes of the books I’ve been opening lately*. Repaving some of my website so there are more digital rooms to tend to and furnish with my work. Even if I think it would be banal to upload, otherwise it just sits, simmers, or sinks into the rotting hard-drive.

Where is my tiny scholar hat and tiny scholar costume?

* = Detransitioned, Baby by Torrey Peters, The Earthquake Room by Davey Davis, Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi, Small Beauty by Jia Qing Wilson-Yang, After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus, Dante’s Inferno, letters between Richard Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck, various things by Anne Boyer, Emily Dickinson, and Anne Carson

Date: 2/7/21
Time: 7:44PM
Subject: On being less small

Foundation
In the bed. I own the wind of my strangeness. It shudders and the shingles fall. Every birch tree slick with black. Remember to inhale before rewriting the line. Glass seizes - crawls - in front of you. You won’t be scared. Yes,

-

I want a cloth draped over my head as I open up the scroll of life. Red purple blue velvet golden tassled dark oak sacred scroll. I want to look into the trick mirror and see a milk pail tipped over in tall grass. The text is so incredibly small. Amen


Date: 2/5/21
Time: 10:17AM
Subject: Jack of all trades

Master of none
Better than a master of one